Yumiko Yamazakis art work "Remembrance of the time" makes use of handmade paper in a unique way. Instead of drawing painting or making an art object, she has used washi to produce a new type of time based art. She is using the handmade paper to present a remembrance of a particular time and place. The paper becomes a repository, literally and figuratively, to document the story of what transpires during a given time period in a specific plot of ordinary earth. Handmade paper, being made of natural fibers from Kozo plants and water, harmonizes well with the concept of this project. It is natural color and texture and its strength in being able to chance with time and weather without disintegrating make it an ideal material for Yamazaki`s work.

During the time of this study, September-November 1999, one can see the changing of seasons from summer to autumn and many daily difference in rainfall, amounts of sunlight and temperature and even the occasional influences of visitors and other artists working nearby. All of this affects the paper and the plot of earth under study in Mino City. All of the chances over time happen by chance and are controlled entirely by Nature, not the artist, she did not plant anything, and she did not interfere with nature`s course. Like a scientist she carefully documented exactly what happened

Her art work "Remembrance of the time" is the presentation of this documentation in three forms: a video made by the artist, handmade paper sheets formed each day by the artist exposed to the weather of that particular day and handmade paper sheets in which the artist embedded the plant specimens collected at regular intervals. The two-hour video skillfully gives the story of the project. One see Yamazaki begin by plotting out a grid with twelve rectangles dug in the earth of the garden at the studio in Mino City. These holes are exactly the size of the washi that she would create for the project. One sees her digging in the earth, shaping the holes with precision and scraping out all the remains of the plants that were living there. The bare soil is left to and new plants emerge. One sees in the video the growth of new plants in these rectangular holes, and one see Yamazaki's creation her art by plucking the plants at regular intervals and carefully placing them in the sheets of washi made each day by the artist.

Yamazaki`s work glorifies and magnifies the small insignificant ordinary plants-mostly weeds- that one usually neglects to notice. These are presented in the washi sheets as treasures for study and admiration. Yamazaki almost reverently plucks the tiny specimens and arranges them meticulously in the handmade kozo paper in the exact same spot that they occupy in the grid she created on the ground. Yamazaki's attention to these tiny plants, reminds one of the expression attributed to Einstein, "God is in the details." In looking at these details we can see the workings of nature--its continuous flux, order within disorder, its tremendous variety--and the beauty in the commonplace.

Yamazaki`s art work "Remembrance of the time" also creates an aesthetically satisfying art object-the handmade paper sheets that record the effects of time and place. The paper bends and buckles as it dries with the tiny plants embedded in it. Some of the plants perhaps take root in the damp vegetable fiber and begin to grow again after being plucked from the earth. Each sheet of paper is watermarked with the date of its making and left outside in the garden to record the wind, rain and weather of that particular day. These sheets all bear the makings of the time and place and give another from of visual remembrance.

The presentation of Yamazaki`s work in a gallery allows the viewer an exciting opportunity to enter into the artist's mind. The viewer recognizes the creative magnitude of this seemingly simple project with deep conceptual underpinnings

Yumiko Yamazaki & Nobuhiko Ichikawa

After the seed is planted in small rectangular of shallowly dug soil, every new day brings a new unforseen circumstance (birds, wind, rain or sun). The transferring of those circumstances into the fine knitting of paper is not the only part of the work. The author creates an archive on videotape whose purpose is "to note the recollections of the moment that cannot be seen". The purpose of every archive is to reconstruct the possibilities of human conceptions and cognitions. In this case we do not deal with classification of existing thought cognitions, but with natural processes and the attempt to comprehend them. Human efforts to do so seem ridiculously restricted. Or it just seems so to us who are divided from nature and unused to listen to it? The stress is on the training of attention, as mysterious as the reason for that may appear. Therefore any classification of her artistic procedure into the drawers of art history, which lead us to quick conclusions, will be avoided in order to invite to reminiscence of the listening to silent changes, because that is the discreetly delivered mission of this work. To achieve this goal we must start off from the empty screen of our own consciousness and slowly, like into the washi paper, knit-in the remembrance about the changes within the designated space and time.

While observing the paintings made by her husband Nobuhiko Ichikawe, the notion of opposition emerges immediately. While her work is all silence, concentration on the nature of the process, his works are overcrowded with human presence. As much as her works seem to be typically Japanese art, in his paintings we recognize the presence of European influences. It is impossible to avoid associations with all those artists from the past who drew their motives from, to us "mortals" invisible, world of phantasm. Still, in his phantasmagorias, as in those of his distant forerunners, it is possible to recognize the roots of reality. Although at the first glance they seem to be reminiscences to the craft of painting from the past (it is impossible to avoid associations with Bosch and Archimbold), if we gaze into this marvellous liliputian world, we will be surprised by recognizing some universal themes which bring forth the author's critical view to the surrounding world - world of adventures and undertakes similar to funny wading or loosing your way through labyrinth of many open roads, where people act like arrogant tourists, or seem to be comical dwarfs in cramped up motions, piled up with unnecessary things, tightened with dense schedule of everyday obligations and duties.